Looking back to that first fortnight after my arrival
at the Old Squire's, I think what most impressed my youthful mind was the
country verdure and the bird-songs. Everything looked so very green, accustomed
as my eyes were to the red city bricks, white doorsteps and dusty streets. The
universal green of those June days at times well nigh bewildered me.

Astronomers tell us that there are systems of worlds
in outer space, presided over by green suns; it was as if I had been
transported to such a world. Moreover, the effect was cool and calm and
healthful; cities are abnormal places of abode; man originated and during all
the early ages of his development, lived in the green, arboreal country,
surrounded by rustic scenery and sylvan quiet. The clangor and roar of a great
city, particularly the noise by night, is unnatural; nor are the reflected
colors from urban structures normal to the eye. Add to these the undue tension
to which city life, as a whole, braces the living substance of brain and nerve,
and the reason why city populations have to be so constantly recruited from the
country is in some degree explained. Children even more than older persons need
country surroundings.

Next to the deep novelty of the wide green landscape,
came the bird-songs. It was June. The air seemed to me all a-quiver with
bird-notes, and I was listening to each and every one. Ah, to my untried, youthful
eyes those fresh great hay-fields, whitening with ox-eyed daisies, reddening
with sweet-scented clover and streaked golden with vivid yellow butter-cups,
over which the song-convulsed bobolinks hovered on arcuate wings!

I had never heard the nesting song of a bobolink
before. What a song it is! — the eager zeal, the exultation in it. The
overflowing, rollicking joy with which it is poured forth, filled me with such
gleeful astonishment, the first time I heard one, and struck such a chord of
sympathetic feeling in my heart and so powerfully, that I recollect shouting,
"ye-ho!" and racing tumultuously after the rapturous singer.

"What does that bird say?" I cried.

Laughing quietly at my fresh curiosity, the Old
Squire told me that the bird was supposed to say, —

Addison gave a somewhat different interpretation
which has now slipped my memory; I deemed the Old Squire's version the more
reliable one. While strawberrying in the fields, that summer, I searched three
or four times for the nests which I felt sure were close by, in the grass, for
the little plain gray wife of the noisy singer sat on the weed-tops, crying, —
"Skack! skack!" but I could not find them.

Once, I remember, the following year Theodora and I
resolved that we would find the nest of one bold fellow that kept singing close
over our heads, as we were gathering strawberries in a grassy swale, in the
west field. We set down our dishes and crept over every foot of a tract at
least a quarter of an acre in extent, and went over a part of it two or three
times. At last, we found it, but not till we had crushed both nest and eggs
beneath our crawling knees — a denouement which distressed Theodora so much
that she declared she would never search for a bobolink's nest again.
"Clumsy monsters that we are," said she; "the poor thing's nest
is crushed into the dirt!"

When we came to mow that swale a few days after,
Gramp first marvelled, then grumbled repeatedly; for the grass was in a mat. He
spoke of it at the dinner table that day, making a covert accusation against
Gram, whereupon Theodora and I owned up in the matter, Doad naively adding that
we had done it "on the strength of Gram's original permit," but that
we had agreed never to do so again. The Old Squire laughed a little grimly and
said he wanted it understood, that the permit, alluded to, was not
transferable. But the old lady now interposed her opinion, that the permit
could be made a moderate use of by others, if she saw fit — and needed
strawberries.

A pair of blue-birds built their nest in a box which
Addison had nailed to a short pole and set up in the barnyard wall; and every
morning, as we milked the cows, we would hear their plaintive notes, repeated
over and over to each other as they flew about; — "Deary, cheer up, Deary,
cheer up!" as if life needed constant mutual consolation, to be supported.
"Old Ummy," the house cat, was much inclined to watch their box and
once attempted to climb up to them.

Two pairs of peewees built about the premises, one
just inside the south barn cellar, the other under a projecting window-sill at
the end of the wagon-house. These two pairs, or younger birds reared there, had
built in these same places for seven or eight years. Night and morning as we
milked, and at noon also, as we sat grinding scythes at the well, those old
peewees would alight on posts, or gables, rub their beaks twice on the dry wood
and cry, "Peewee, peewee, peewitic; pewee, peer-a-zitic!" For some
not very good reason, I took a boyish dislike to peewees. They are very useful
birds, great destroyers of worms, moths and flies, and so far as I know, never
do the slightest harm, which can hardly be said of all our feathered favorites.

As we hoed potatoes and corn on those green June
days, the song of the little gray ground sparrows was constantly in my ears,
although the others seemed not to notice it.

"And what does that one say?" I asked
Gramp.

"What one?" the old gentleman asked.

"Why, that bird! It sings all the time," I
rejoined. "Don't you hear it?"

He stopped and appeared to listen, at a loss, for a
minute, as to what I heard.

"Oh, those sparrows," replied he, at
length. "Addison, can you tell him what they say?"

"Yes," replied Ad, laughing, "they say
and say it very distinctly, too, 'Charlotte, Charlotte, don't you hear me
whistle?' Charlotte is his mate, you know; and the reply to that is 'Philip,
Philip's sitting on the thistle.'"

"That is a little different from what they used to
tell me when I was a boy," Gramp remarked. "I was told that they say,
'War-link, war-link, christle, christle, christle; high-link, high-link,
twiddle, twiddle, twiddle.'"

"Good deal anybody knows what a bird says,"
Halstead exclaimed, derisively. "They don't say anything that I can make
out."

But it seemed to me, after Addison had mentioned it,
that the first, or opening note of the song sparrow, was much like,
"Charlotte, Charlotte, don't you hear me whistle?" They had several
other notes, too, not as easily likened to human language; indeed, these humble
little sparrows, when one comes to listen closely to them in all their moods,
have a curious variety of short arias.

During my second week at the farm, I found a
sparrow's nest in a small bunch of hard-hack, a few rods from the cow-pasture
bars, with four eggs, resembling, only a little larger than, speckled garden
beans; and I visited it every morning, till the sprawling, skinny little chicks
were hatched. But on the third morning the nest was empty; something had taken
them. Addison said that it was most likely a crow, but possibly a snake. We
often found the nests, while haying in the fields; the scythe generally passed
over them without doing any harm, and to save them from the rake, we would put
up a stick close beside them. But their enemies are wofully numerous; not half
the nests of young are reared. Ants, I think, kill numbers of the nestlings,
soon after they are hatched, when they chance to be near an ant-hill.

But in the early mornings and evenings, and before
the quickly gathering south rains, the songsters of all others, which made the
air vocal, were the great, bold, red-breasted robins, not fewer than nine pairs
of which had their capacious nests in the garden, orchard and Balm o' Gilead trees.
They always took the greater part of our cherries, till Addison at a
considerable expense, some years later, bought mosquito netting to spread over
the tree tops; and they also ate strawberries greedily; but we as constantly
overlooked their offenses, they sang so royally and came familiarly back to us
so early every spring. No one can long find the heart to injure Robin
Red-Breast.

I do not think it necessary to qualify, or speak of
this our fine bird as the "American robin, or red-breasted thrush," because
a different bird is called the robin in England. This our bird is the Robin;
and we shall call it so without apology, or explanatory adjectives.

The robin songs in the Balm o' Gileads, just across
the yard from our chamber windows, were the matins that often waked us in June,
and sounded in our drowsy ears as we lay, still half asleep, reluctant to rise
and dress. For however it may be with most boys, I am obliged to confess that
both then and later, I was a sleepy-head in the morning; it always seemed to me
on waking, particularly in the summer months, that I was not half rested, and
that I would give almost anything I possessed for another hour of sleep. As a
fact, I now feel sure that I did not get sleep enough, from half past nine in
the evening to five in the morning; and I think that most boys and girls of
thirteen and fourteen need nine hours of sleep in every twenty-four hours,
especially where they are in active exercise or work throughout the day. It is
really cruel to drive a boy up when he is so shockingly sleepy! There was
always so much going on, that we could not well go to bed till after nine in
the evening, although I would sometimes steal away up-stairs as soon as it was
dark.

Curiously enough it was when I was but about half
awake in the morning, that those robin-songs sounded the most distinctly, and I
seemed to hear every note and trill which they uttered.

followed after a moment or two, perhaps, by a shrill
and noisy "Piff! piff! piff!" — as some sudden dissension broke out,
or some suspicious cat, or other marauder, came near the nest tree. The crows,
always bold in the early morning hours, would come into the Balm o' Gileads
after birds' nests, sometimes, before we were astir. I remember that Addison
once cut my nap short by firing his gun from the chamber window at a crow that
was sneaking into the Balm o' Gileads after young robins. He shot the crow, but
my own ear rang for more than two hours, and I was so confused for a time, that
I scarcely knew enough to dress myself.

There is no combination of letters which more nearly
represents the song notes of the robin than the above, I think, although many
attempts have been made to render them into some semblance of human language.
Addison always insisted that they said, "Dew-lip, Dew-lip; bill it, bill
it, bill it;" — the whole song being an exhortation of the robin to his
mate whose name was Dew-lip, to get up and bill it for worms.
Halstead had somewheres got hold of a medical rendering of the song, by a
waggish doctor who declared that the robins were constantly admonishing him in
the line of his profession: —

"Kill 'em, cure 'em; physic, physic."

But the rest of us scouted this partisan interpretation.

The explosive, alarmingly energetic danger cry of,
"Piff, piff," which will so suddenly wake the entire vicinity of the
nest, is at times modified and given quite a different intonation, as if to
express discontent: "Fibb, fibb!" and sometimes even loneliness:
"Pheeb, pheeb!" — very mournful.

During a shower, accompanied by wind in heavy
wrenching gusts, in the night, that summer, a nest containing four young robins
fell from a maple, a few rods down the lane, into the grass beneath. Theodora
heard the outcry of the old robins, blended with the thunder and the roar of
the rain, in the night, and noticing their mournful notes next morning about
the tree, made search and discovered the calamity. Addison and she gathered up
the nestlings and putting them in an old berry box, lined with grass and cotton
batting, tied the improvised nest to a branch of the maple. For an hour or two
the scolding old birds would not go near the thing, but later in the day we saw
them, feeding their young in it, quite as if nothing had happened to disturb
them.

In the rear of the wagon-house there grew a
good-sized mountain ash or round-wood tree which nearly every fall was crowned
with the usual great bright-red clusters of bitter berries. Late in October the
robins always came for those berries, and sometimes a flock of fifty or sixty
would assemble. We often tried to frighten the birds away, for the red clusters
are beautiful in winter, but for a long time we never succeeded in saving them.
The robins would linger about for a week, or more, rather than leave a single
bunch of those berries ungathered. Addison once placed a stuffed cat-skin in
the tree, at which the robins scolded vociferously for a day or two from the
neighboring shrubs and fence; but they suddenly discovered the deception and
got all the remaining berries in the course of a single forenoon. Addison was
boasting a little of the success of his ruse when, at dinner, Ellen quietly
bade him go look at the tree. The robins had already got every berry and gone,
leaving the feline effigy in the bare tree, an object of mirth and ridicule. A
scarecrow made of old clothes, stuffed with hay and crowned by an old hat, set
up in the tree the following year, served no better purpose. Ellen and Theodora
then hung an old tin clothes boiler in the tree, and arranged a jangling bunch
of tin ware inside it, with a long line running to the kitchen window, where
they could conveniently give it a jerk every few minutes. This device answered
well for a day or two, and it was very amusing to see those robins scatter from
the tree, when the line was pulled. They were some little time making up their
minds concerning it, and would sit on the back fence and rub their beaks on the
posts, at intervals, as if making a great effort to comprehend the cause of the
"manifestations" inside the boiler. No doubt the more superstitious
ones attributed it to "spirits." Skepticism increased, however, and
by the second day one unbelieving red fellow refused to budge, till the line
was jerked twice, and soon after that they wore the girls out, pulling it, and
got the berries as usual. The year after, Addison saved the berries by
stretching one of his cherry-tree nets over the round-wood tree, in October. It
chanced, however, that the tree failed to produce a crop of berries the next
season and died a year or two later; — a circumstance which Gram hinted,
mysteriously, might be a "dispensation," on account of our persistent
efforts to thwart the robins. It should be taken into account, however, that
the mountain-ash is not long-lived, and that this was already an old tree.

In a large maple, down the lane, a preacher-bird sang
every day in June and until into August, generally loudest and most
continuously, from eleven till two o'clock. On coming to or going from our
dinner, we would often hear him: sometimes he sang in the morning and now and
then after supper. This bird — it is the red-eyed vireo — has an oddly
persistent, pragmatic note, which can hardly be called singing, being more like
declamation and somewhat disconnected and disjoint, as if the
"preacher" were laying down certain truths and facts and seeking by
constant iteration to impress them upon dullards. Betwixt every one of these
short sentences, there is a little pause, as if the preacher were waiting for
the truth to strike home to his hearers; but if the bird is watched, he will be
seen to be picking and hopping about on the branch which serves him as a
pulpit, snapping up a bug or a seed here and there. Yet his discourse goes
steadily on, by the half hour, or hour, sometimes with a rising inflection, as
after a question, sometimes the falling, as having given an irrefutable answer,
himself. Once the idea that the bird is preaching has entered a listener's
mind, he can never shake it off.

"My hearers — where are you? — You know it — you
see it. — Do you hear me? — Do you believe it?" And so on, upon the same
insistent and at length tiresome strain.

"Oh, I do wish that preacher bird would
stop," Ellen would exclaim at times. "He has 'preached' steadily all
the forenoon!"

His place for singing was always about half way from
the ground to the top of the maple, and he rarely came out in sight. The female
was probably sitting on her nest, hard by. They are trim little olive-tinted
birds and often rear two broods, I think, for they remain north till autumn.

Once while Elder Witham was with us, in haying time,
Ellen exclaimed, inadvertently, as we were going in to sit down at table one
day, "There's that preacher bird again!"

The Elder looked at her a moment and said slowly,
"'Preacher-bird, preacher-bird,' what kind of a bird is that, young
lady?"

Greatly abashed at her lapse, Ellen hardly knew how
to best explain it, but Addison came to her rescue. "There are two of
those vireos," he remarked in a perfectly natural, matter-of-fact tone.
"One of them, the warbling vireo, they call the 'brigadier' on account of
its peculiar note, and the other or red-eyed vireo, the 'preacher,' from its
earnest manner of utterance. I don't know," Addison continued, with candid
frankness, "that the names are very well chosen, but we have got in the
habit of calling them that way."

The Elder listened to this, observing Addison
closely, then appeared thoughtful for a moment and said, impressively,
"Well, all God's creatures preach, if only we have ears to hear
them." Ellen drew a long breath of relief, and after dinner, out on the
wood-shed walk, she took Addison by the button and said, "You're a
treasure, Ad; ask me for a cooky any time after this."

The brigadier, or warbling vireo, frequently sits on
the tops of trees, when singing; while the preacher takes his stand midway from
the ground upwards; the brigadier, too, more frequently joins in the great
opening overture of all bird voices, at dawn, to usher in the new day, while preacher
reserves his notes till the earlier choir has ceased its anthem. Withal the
little preacher is much more apt to nest in trees near the habitations of men
than his congener, the brigadier, who not unfrequently makes his abode at a
distance from buildings, where forests border pastures, or old roads enter
woody lands.

Another shrill, small songster of habits quite
similar to the brigadier we used sometimes to hear, but rarely saw, on our way
over to the "Aunt Hannah lot," an adjunct of the Old Squire's farm,
to reach which we crossed a tract of sparse woods. Its notes, prolonged on a
very sharp, high key, resembled the words, My fee-fee-fee-fee-fee! each
louder and keener than the preceding.

Addison was quite uncertain as to this bird, during
the first and second summers we were at the farm. We only saw it once or twice;
for its favorite place, while singing, is at the top of some large dense tree;
and we were never able to find its nest. Addison at length decided that it was
an oven-bird, a surmise which he greatly desired to verify by finding the rest.

Later in life he has often laughed over our ignorance
and our fruitless quests at that time.

Among the raspberry and blackberry briars, beside the
stone wall on the south side of this same old road, leading to the Aunt Hannah
lot, we used to see, occasionally, a deep blue indigo-bird, a very active
little fellow, always flitting and hopping about amongst the briars. But we
never heard it sing, nor utter any note, save rarely a petulant snip, snip,
and never found its nest.

To the south of the same lot there was a tract of
mixed wood, sapling pines, maples, a few beeches, and farther down, nearer the
brook, white ash and great yellow birches, with swamp maples, osier and alder.
Here among the beeches, maples and pines, we at times heard a Theresa-bird.
Theodora chanced to know something of this bird; and I remember that the first
time we ever went there together, she called out to us to listen to the low,
sweet note, which otherwise, in our haste, we should not have noticed. Addison
had never heard it then, and his volumes of Audubon did not describe New
England birds very clearly; but Theodora said this was a Theresa-bird (which we
subsequently found to be the Green Warbler) and that its song was supposed, in
Catholic countries, to be a petition to St. Theresa, viz., — "Hear
me, St. Theresa," beginning quite high and sinking to a much lower
strain. I have since seen in the naturalist Nuttall's work, that this author
compares the note of the Green Warbler to the syllables, te-de-deritsea,
repeated slowly and melodiously.

On the north side of the lane, leading from the house
down to the road, opposite the maple above alluded to, where the robins had a
nest, there stood two elms, quite tall trees, in the uppermost of which, during
three summers, a pair of Baltimore orioles built. These orioles had never come
there previously; at least, the Old Squire had never seen one, but Gram
recognized them the first time one sang, as an old acquaintance of her girlhood
days; she called them Golden Robins and was much delighted to hear them. They
came on one of the first days of June; and as I had arrived but a few days
previously, Gram declared that I "had brought them with me." But the
fact is, that the Baltimore oriole moves its habitat slowly northeastward, in
the wake of man and his orchards and shade trees; for it is one of those birds
which, like the robin, depend on mankind for protection. This pair constructed
a hanging nest from a twig of one of the drooping elm branches and reared a
brood successfully that season; and throughout that entire month of June, their
song, uttered at intervals of their labors, was a daily delight to us all. Next
after the wood thrush and the robin, the loud yet sweetly modulated call of the
Baltimore oriole is the most pleasing of all our bird notes. Pure and sweet as
it is, too, it nearly always startles the hearer, from its regal volume and 5
strength. Gram's version of its song was, Cusick, cusick!So-ho-o-o!Do you know I'm back with you! But the words themselves give no idea
whatever of the song, unless uttered with the strange, liquid modulations which
characterize it.

During the third season some accident befell the
pair, or their nest; they suddenly disappeared and thenceforward we missed
their melodious invocations. Gram, in particular, lamented their departure. A
pair, perhaps the same pair, afterwards built in a butternut tree near the
Edwards' farmhouse; but they never returned to us. To the lover of birds, the
oriole in its flight among the trees, like a yellow meteor flashing past, is a
sight that instantly rivets the attention, and is as delightfully startling to
the eye as its song is to the ear. But I know of no device by means of which
they can be attracted to nest in any given locality; their tastes are not well
enough known to us; "houses," like those which attract the blue-bird
and the martin, possess no charm for the oriole. With the first of June Gram
watched, wistfully, for the return of this pair, during a number of successive
springs; and for her sake especially, we all hoped they would come back.

I arrived too late the first spring, to hear the
woodlands echo to the May-note of the white-throated sparrow. Once only, while
going out to get the cows with little Wealthy, the second week after I came, I
heard it twice repeated, from the woods along the south side of the pasture,
and when I asked my small companion what kind of a bird that was, she roguishly
cried, "Oh, that's old Ben Peabody."

"Is that what he says?" I asked, for the
name at once struck me as being like the bird's note.

"Yes," cried Wealthy. "He says, 'Old
Ben Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,' just as plain as anything; Theodora says so;
and so does Nell and all of us, but Addison. Ad thinks he says, 'All day
whittling, whittling, whittling.' And Alf Batchelder says, — but I'll not tell
what he thinks the bird says."

"What is it?" I queried.

"It's nothing very pretty," quoth Wealthy,
running off to get around the cows, thereby evading the question altogether,
for she had not as yet grown very well acquainted with me.

But I have perhaps lingered too long with birds and
bird-songs. It is a fond subject, however, and scarcely can I forbear to speak
of the veeries, the vesper-birds, and "hair-birds" whose nests we so
often found in the orchard; the cedar birds or cherry birds which so
persistently stripped the wild cherry trees and pear-plum shrubs; the wood
thrushes that trilled forth such sad, mellow refrains in the cool, gray border
of the wood-lot below the fields, at eventide; the yellow-hammers that tapped
on the pasture stumps and cried out boisterously when rain was impending; the
wrens that filled and re-filled a bit of hollow aqueduct log on the lane wall,
with sticks for a nest and laid thirteen eggs in it; the hundreds of
black-birds that built in the reeds down at the great bog, near the head of the
lake; the sap-suckers that punctured the trunks of the apple-trees with
thousands of tiny holes; the many-voiced blue-jays that came around when the
corn was ripening in September and sometimes lingered all winter in the
neighborhood.

And of the great pileated woodpeckers, a pair of
which occasionally cried loud and long from the five lofty pine stubs in the
colt pasture, beyond the Aunt Hannah lot; the yellow-birds that piped, pee-chid-aby,
pee-chid-aby, on wavy lines of flight, upon the last days of August,
just ere taking wing for warmer climes; the imitative cat-birds that built in
the alders along the road across the meadow, whose nests the boys held it
lawful to destroy because, forsooth, "they sucked other birds' eggs,"
a false accusation rendered plausible, perhaps, from their disagreeable feline
squalls, and not wholly ingenuous imitations of the songs of the thrush, the
veery and the robin.

How well, too, I recall the cuckoos that, night or
day, intoned so moodily in the willow copses below the east field fence and
suffered from a like unpopular accusation of "laying their eggs in other
birds' nests." Also the mated triads of sooty chimney swallows that
rumbled nightly in the great brick flues of the farmhouse, and at first almost
terrified me, but at length furnished the thalamian refrain that most surely
lulled me asleep; the red-headed woodpeckers that with sharp cries and concave
stoop of flight moved fitfully, from tree to tree, tapping this one loudly,
that one low and dull, and whose nest hole in the dead maple on the hillside
was re-occupied year after year, till at last the stub blew down and broke
short off at the hole itself; the king-fishers that with the same stooping
flight, sprung their sharp rattles along the brooks and lakeside; the martins
that feloniously caught the bees, and every season dragged their squalling,
screaming young out of their pole-house, then poked them off the platform to
fly for themselves, having first, however, cleared the yard of cats.

The militant king birds, too, that built every June
on the tops of the small apple-trees in the young orchard, and raged in mid
air, overhead, pouring out a wild farago of sharp cries, never so happy as when
in full career after crows, hawks, cats or dogs; the moth-catching night-hawks
that cried peerk from their wide mouths, high in the sky at nightfall,
and dived far aslant on stiff wings, with a long drawn soo-oo-ook; the
clucking whip-poor-wills, that chanted from the bare flat pasture rocks; the
chickadees that came into the orchard and about the great loose farm woodpile,
in February, with their odd little minor refrain of cic-a-da-da-da-da,
mere feathery mites of ceaseless activity that somehow did not freeze, at 20°
below zero.

In this freezing weather, too, came the white-winged
flocks of snow-buntings, that heralded the coming storm and flew away, blending
with the whirling snowflakes, uttering queer thin notes that seemed like spirit
voices from the upper air: all these and many others, Nature's humble angels,
what part and parcel they were of that dear old farm life of ours!

Nor yet have I mentioned the larger game birds, nor
the birds of prey; the "hoot-owls" that both in summer and winter,
but oftenest in March and October, on still, dark, cloudy evenings, uttered
their dismal, deep bass hoot, hoot, hoo-oo-oot, from the depths of the
gloomy forest side, beyond the Little Sea; the hen-hawks that cried down chickee-ee
to us, from endless mazy circles high over the farm, and occasionally decimated
the poultry, or were seen sailing low across the fields with a snake dangling
from their claws; the eagles that seldom, but on a few occasions paid a brief
visit to the vicinity; the herons that frogged along the boggy shore of the
lake and built their nests in the tops of the Foy Brook pines; the wild geese
that flew northward in a wide V, early in the spring and again southward in
October; the sheldrake and the black ducks which Addison had such success
shooting every fall, in the old mill pond, beyond the east wood-lot; the
swift-diving loons of the blue Pennesseewassee, that flew heavily across the
hills, to several northerly ponds, uttering shaken, hollow cries, or that in
the early evening and morning hours, pealed their mellow, alto horns from the
calm bosom of the lake; the partridges that "drummed" in the outlying
copses and patches of second growth, in April, and led forth their broods in
June, subject every autumn to our first excited, early efforts at gunning; and
last of all, the flapping, canny, thievish, black crows that like the foxes
were always about, and always at loggerheads with the farmers.